…Making Memorial Day part of a long weekend has had the unfortunate effect of in many cases relegating it to a vacation rather than focusing on it as a day of memory. As Meir Soloveichik notes in the June issue of Commentary, it is “observed by many (though not all) Americans as escapes from work, and too few ponder the link between the sacrifice of American dead and the freedom that we, the living, enjoy.” Roth’s novel [The Plot Against America] showed how (in Sinclair Lewis’s phrase) it might have “happened here.” But the book was fiction, and the historical fact is it didn’t happen here. Eventually more than 400,000 Americans died in World War II to make sure it didn’t, and to secure our extraordinary freedoms. The list of American casualties in various other wars is also stunning. READ MORE